92 quotes found
“To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force...”
“You could say, in a way, that I'm not actually a writer, though perhaps I might be called a recorder? ... I just happen to be one of those holding the pen, that's all.”
“When you write, its like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are lon...”
“Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.”
“I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing au...”
“The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving ...”
“This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted i...”
“Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something...”
“At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I ta...”
“All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?”
“An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius”
“Dont polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes arent improvements, theyre just changes.”
“Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.”
“On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didnt want to know, and they were all a result of interest...”
“My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people ...”
“Inspiration is the crche of your brainchildren. If you dont feed them, they will die, and never come back. So someone please think about the children!”
“People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.”
“Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.”
“Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first bas...”
“The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination”
